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Zacarias Moussaoui
Zacarias Moussaoui: low-level operative, or key player in dealings between Saudi Arabia and al-Qaida? Photograph: Reuters
Zacarias Moussaoui: low-level operative, or key player in dealings between Saudi Arabia and al-Qaida? Photograph: Reuters

Zacarias Moussaoui says al-Qaida was backed by Saudi Arabia. But can he be believed?

This article is more than 9 years old

Extremist serving life in prison for his role in the 9/11 attacks makes new claims about dealings with the kingdom that while intriguing don’t pass the smell test

Zacarias Moussaoui, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the 9/11 attacks, has claimed that al-Qaida received donations from some of the most senior members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family even after Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war against the US in 1998.

In a court deposition this week, the French Algerian extremist also said that he met with a Saudi diplomat posted in Washington to discuss a plan to assassinate the US president using a surface-to-air missile and plotted to bomb the US embassy in London.

The Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington has rejected the charges, telling the New York Times that Moussaoui was a “deranged criminal” with no credibility. But allegations of Saudi support for al-Qaida have long been the subject of heated debate – so what can we make of the new claims?

Moussaoui, now 46, appears to have been a controversial last-minute candidate picked by al-Qaida as a substitute if other prospective hijackers could not join the 9/11 plot or pulled out. He was detained as he tried to learn to fly big jets in August 2001 and may have been in the US to undertake other attacks. He came very close to jeopardising the whole 9/11 conspiracy – indeed, many have argued that he would have done if US agencies had been more effective. Despite erratic statements and behaviour, Moussaoui, a French citizen, was ruled competent to stand trial.

The new testimony has some largely uncontroversial elements that ring true – and plenty more controversial allegations that do not.

Moussaoui’s description of the internal workings of al-Qaida in Afghanistan has details – such as who was running key bomb-making laboratories – which have been corroborated elsewhere. It is also entirely plausible that Bin Laden and others contemplated a major truck-bomb attack on the US embassy in the UK in 1999; a similar plot the previous year had devastated the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Moussaoui’s descriptions of Kandahar, the southern Afghan city where he was based, appear accurate.

Yet there are flaws in his evidence. Moussaoui says a visit of Bin Laden’s mother to Afghanistan in 1999 – never previously reported – was facilitated by the head of the Pakistani military intelligence, hardline general Hamid Gul. But Gul left the post a decade before. Moussaoui describes bin Laden’s “total reverence and obedience” to senior Saudi establishment clerics, who the extremist propagandist and organiser loathed. The idea that Moussaoui, a French Algerian with “colloquial Arabic” previously unknown to al-Qaida, could meet Bin Laden within 36 hours of “sending him a CV” on arrival in Afghanistan from Chechnya and then be charged with a crucial job of compiling a database of financial donors seems far-fetched.

Moussaoui describes taking a private jet to meet half a dozen of the most senior Saudi royals in 1999 – after the bombings of US embassies in east Africa – to bring them letters from Bin Laden. He returned with cash, he says. Members of the Saudi establishment did contribute to Afghan mujahideen factions which fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and may have given money to individuals from the Middle East engaged in that struggle too, but Bin Laden had fallen out with the al-Sauds in the early 1990s, and had then been stripped of his citizenship. In 1995 and 1996 he had published vitriolic indictments of their rule.

Efforts were made by the Saudis to negotiate the expulsion of Bin Laden by the Taliban authorities in Afghanistan at this time, with Prince Turki al-Faisal even flying to Kandahar to pick up bin Laden in the early autumn of 1998. Mullah Omar, the Taliban supreme leader, reneged on their deal. The possibility of couriers being put up in palaces before meeting a group of the most powerful men in the kingdom just a few months later seems slim.

The idea that Moussaoui met with a Saudi diplomat in Kandahar is just about feasible, though a discussion with one about a plan to fire stingers at Air Force One in Washington appears improbable. Any such discussions would surely have been routed through senior commanders of al-Qaida, even Bin Laden himself, not a relatively lowly figure who ran a guesthouse and did odd jobs.

Another plan Moussaoui says was mooted at the time was to use a crop duster to spray some kind of chemical weapon. This may well be true, but is not new: it was considered a threat in 2001.

Why make these allegations now? Moussaoui, though he eventually pleaded guilty, argued at his trial that he was not part of the 9/11 plot but was in the US to conduct another form of attack. His appeal against his sentence was rejected in 2010. The new allegations, with the details about the other plots he was supposedly involved in, may be some kind of new bid to overturn his life sentence. Other motivations are unclear, but a desire simply to escape the crushing tedium of life in a supermax prison may be one.

But Moussaoui’s charges come at an interesting time. Former US senator Bob Graham recently called for the release of 28 pages redacted from an 800-page joint congressional inquiry from 2002 on the 9/11 attacks of which he was lead author, saying they “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as the principal financier” of the hijackers.

The pages are being withheld for reasons of national security, though Barack Obama has reportedly told 9/11 families that he wants to see the pages declassified. Given the strength of the deputation the US president recently led to Riyadh to cement ties following the succession of King Salman to the Saudi throne, and the cost to the relationship of releasing the missing chapter, it does not appear likely that anyone, inside or outside a supermax, will be reading it soon.

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